Listing to Port

The googolplex, the number of ants, the number of appendices, the largest known Mersenne Prime, the second ‘O’ in the 'HOLLYWOOD’ sign which is in fact a giant squashed number 0, the sexdecillard, the greatest depth to which a footnote may be nested by a million monkeys spending a million years on a million typewriters, the maximum capacity of a chocolate teapot assuming the Universe’s entire resources were all focussed on its design and manufacture in space out of space chocolate, those inflatable birthday balloons that are shaped like numbers, Skewes’ Numbers, the historical sum of mathematician-pencil-hours, 'Glitter and be Gay’ from Candide, five but in really big units, Graham’s number, TREE(3), the glitter capacity of a single unicorn, the biggest number you can think of, that number plus one, the previous number with bigger shoes on and a large bushy beard.

The ratio of real US presidents to fictional ones, the number of Mona Lisas, the average number of human legs per human, the number of capybaras riding the London Underground at this moment, the ratio between the energy density due to the cosmological constant and the critical density of the universe, the number of people who are wearing the world’s best hat, the number of vast sprawling alien cities glimmering with tiny red lights established in the oceanic deeps of the mid-pacific, the mass of an electron in kilograms, the ratio of big fish to little fish, the number of living dodos, the ratio of fictional plumbers to real ones, the fine-structure constant, the number of Hitler’s testicles in the Albert Hall, the number of books that have been written about ten billion fictional plumbers (so far).

1. 10. A true classic, ten in base ten is so widespread that it cannot but help be at the top of our list.
2. 101. Ten in ternary. Because you love radix economy, and ternary has radix economy.
3. 14. Because you are interesting and a bit obscure, just like ten in senary.
4. 1010. Where would this list be without ten in binary? Short, that’s where.
5. Fish. The ten of choice for the lazy surrealist.
6. A. Do you like computing? Are you bored of binary? Then ten in hexadecimal may be for you.
7. 12. Ten in octal, perfect for slightly more obscure computing fans.
8. X. For history buffs, Roman numeral ten may be the way to go.
9. 11. The ten of choice for the chronically late.
10. < (well, approximately). For history-buff one-upmanship, why not try ten in Babylonian sexagesimal?